BCG and Meta’s report reveals solutions for M&E players in digital

The report sheds light on key content consumption trends in India, and digital’s impact across OTT, linear TV and movie studios

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Meta have released a report on digital’s influence on media consumption in India. The report, titled ‘Seeing the big picture - harnessing digital to drive M&E growth’, sheds light on key content consumption trends, and digital’s impact on content discovery across OTT, linear TV (LTV) and movie studios.

The Meta-commissioned report by BCG is based on a survey of 2,600 consumers across 15 towns and cities. It highlights some pivotal behavioural trends seen in media and entertainment consumption. 

In digital consumption of content, the study reveals that the growth in this space, is outpacing all other segments, including TV or other entertainment formats. 

In 2022, consumers spent an average of over three hours daily consuming digital video content, compared to two hours in 2019. In contrast, the average daily TV consumption stood at over four hours in 2022, compared to close to four hours in 2019. 

What’s more, consumers are actively employing digital to discover new viewing content. As per the report, about 60% of consumers seek information about content before deciding to watch it. The process of discovering new content across OTT, LTV and movies, occurs (80%) through online research. 

Pointing out the primary sources of information to decide on watching content, Shaveen Garg, managing director and partner, BCG, reveals, “For LTV and OTT, up to 47% of consumers rely on information from official pages, search engines, long and short-form video platforms, and social media accounts of the shows.”

While for cinema, the majority look at reviews and information from peers on live social meetings, chats and social media platforms. 

This insight, according to Garg, is crucial for M&E businesses to up their growth. “M&E businesses must leverage this insight to be present at the time viewers are interested in ‘knowing more’ or are looking for ‘peer feedback or recommendations’.”

With the growing appetite amongst consumers for content, the study reveals that video verticals are catering to the rising demand. The video-based media and entertainment market size in India, as per the report, is projected to grow at more than 12% CAGR over the next three years. 

Digital video content, including OTT and short-form videos, will rack up an estimated CAGR of 34% till 2025. Currently, India hosts an estimated 600 million online video viewers, which is a 50% increase since 2019. 

However, the report reveals that the M&E sector in India is under-indexed in marketing spends towards digital, compared to its peers globally. Domestically too, the sector falls behind other B2C industries in digital spends.

Garg explains, “The issues which Indian M&E players face include the inability of M&E companies to fuel organic growth in creating digital influence, and the lack of infrastructure to properly monitor measurements. There is a scarcity of metrics that can truly depict the impact of each marketing initiative on or off platform.”

“The approach of marketing needs to be de-averaged for the type of content, target audience and, thus, the ways of engagement - a single size fits all doesn’t work.”

Laying out the potential solutions for M&E businesses in their pursuit of a better digital infrastructure, Garg suggests, “They must organically develop video content factory - both short-form videos and static digital content that is snackable and shareable.”

“There should also be an emphasis on digital footprint management across platforms. There are innovations that the report talks about as creative solutions to influence customers either before or after the content is released.”

Other significant findings of the report - contrary to industry perception, women, small town residents and people over 35 years, have significant digital influence driving their content discovery and consumption choices. 

For instance, among OTT watchers, after consuming content, 78% of the surveyed men said that they use digital to engage with the content. This number was equally high for women (77%).

Also, before watching something on OTT, more people from smaller towns (81%) use digital for content discovery than people from large towns (74%).